Seismic Resilient Design of the New Long Beach Civic Center (Article) and Revisiting the UCSD Full-scale 7-story Building Test

At Nabih Youssef & Associates (NYA) we had the great experience to work on the seismic resilient design of the new Long Beach Civic Center (LBCC) constructed in 2019. A recently published article in the STRUCTURE Magazine, presents an overview of this project. The LBCC is among the very few medium rise reinforced concrete wall buildings in US designed for enhanced seismic performance in terms of re-occupancy, functional recovery, and direct losses in addition to occupant safety.

The seismic design of the LBCC utilized the knowledge and experience we gained from the 2005 UCSD 7-story building full-scale shake-table test. This landmark test, of the tallest building ever tested on a shake-table in US, demonstrated how cost-efficient seismic designs of medium rise RC wall buildings can be developed to sustain very strong near-fault earthquake shaking with minor and easily repairable structural damage.?

Videos from the 7-story building test are found here

Links to key journal publications are found here:

1.???Design of the Test and Analysis (2012 ASCE Alfred Noble Prize)

2.???Test Results

3.???Non-structural components response